The new GigaPORT-Q08 blade, which debuted at the Cisco Live event in London, has eight 40Gbps QSFP+ fiber ports, for a total of 320Gbps of manageable throughput. Gigamon says this is necessary for the increasingly demanding data center environment.

The idea is for the product to carefully manage vast amounts of network traffic and route it quickly to security systems, applications, or related performance management tools - which is accomplished by intelligent rerouting of moving data, the company says.

The Q08 is used as part of Gigamon's GigaVUE HD series traffic visibility nodes, a system that can incorporate up to eight different Gigamon blades, along with two control modules. This end-of-row system connects to top-of-rack devices for input, effectively consolidating low-usage network links into large virtual ports for better efficiency.

Gigamon is targeting large enterprises, service providers and cloud companies with the new and improved traffic visibility system. Each Q08 blade costs $59,000, meaning an HD node full of the devices should cost $472,000.

Email Jon Gold at jgold@nww.com and follow him on Twitter at @NWWJonGold.